What are the costs associated with building an online store or site?

: This greatly depends on whether you build the store yourself or hire a professional to build it for you. If you design the store yourself, building it will not cost as much. Designers may charge anywhere from a few hundred dollars all the way into the high thousands to build your store. Professional design can certainly help with conversions, but you do not necessarily need the best looking store to make money online (itís where you show up, not how it looks). On the other hand, your potential market customers may not want to buy from a store that looks less than professional. The cost really does depend on your specific selling and platform needs and the needs of your target market or niche customers.

I have built online stores for less than $500.00 and I have built larger stores that sell for nearly $30,000.00. The one with less value was built on a free open source platform and had little to no built-in search engine friendliness. The higher end store had all the bells and whistles, was custom programmed with custom graphics and came built extremely search engine friendly

The costs vary from the nature of the business. Keep in mind that online businesses require much less startup capital compared with regular businesses. The website domain and hosting cost can be the largest expense, or the smallest. Depending on your general knowledge, you can design the site yourself or hire a professional. You can also try to arrange for some junior web designer to do it for free (he gets a reference for his portfolio, you get the site). For more specifics, and as a general advice, narrow the choices down until two ideas remain. Basically, different sites/niches have different operating costs and a general answer for your question does not exist.